Hurricane Helene last September 24 quickly developed from a tropical storm into a Category 4 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico within two days. That truly caught my attention. Never before in my recent life could I remember the waters in the Gulf of Mexico having been so warm in late September to form such a devastating hurricane, which ultimately caused southwestern Virginia at least $78.7 million in damage and as much as $200 billion for the entire southeastern U.S.
Weather experts estimated that the waters in the Gulf of Mexico were 85°F on September 24, which were extremely warm, and contributed to the rapid intensification of the devastating hurricane. Thankfully, it quickly downgraded to a category 3 and 2 as it progressed northeast towards the Florida panhandle while narrowly missing Tampa.
According to the BBC Science Focus magazine, “as global temperatures rise, sea waters are warming, causing increased evaporation. This boosts the humidity in the atmosphere, creating the conditions necessary for intense [my emphasis], cyclone-like [hurricane-like] storms.” This strongly appears what happened in the Gulf of Mexico last September 24 and elsewhere throughout the world in the last five years.
Ironically, much of the destructive property damage from the torrential rain and high winds occurred much further to the north of Florida in far north Georgia, far eastern Tennessee and especially western North Carolina along with much of southwest Virginia to a lesser extent.
These types of devastating hurricanes usually originate in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which give the eastern United States and Caribbean plenty of time to prepare for a disastrous hurricane. However, this was not to be so.
Hurricane Helene heavily devastated the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina, especially Asheville, almost 500 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico causing a conservative estimate of $100 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage according to FEMA, which proved to be greatly inept under the Biden administration. Even as late as December in the frigid weather of the Appalachian Mountains many people were still living in canvas tents or yurts and other substandard housing, which was a national disgrace due to a lack of funds from a non-responsive FEMA.
I am neither an earth scientist nor a geoscientist and certainly not an expert on “global weirding.” However, I must admit that an all-time record eight inches of snow in New Orleans, Louisiana on January 22 was rather “weird.” That also included another five inches or more of “weird” snow in Pensacola, Florida on the same date.
If these unprecedented Category 4 hurricanes become more common in the Gulf of Mexico in the next ten years, the U.S. is going to have an expensive environmental and economic problem on its hands. That is because it could cost the U.S. Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars, which U.S. taxpayers can ill afford with a profligate and gargantuan national debt of over $36.5 trillion and interest payments of $1 trillion every one hundred days ($3.6 trillion per year).
If these category 4 hurricanes continue to occur so quickly in the Gulf of Mexico, Trump’s 20th century, nostalgic policy of “drill, baby, drill” and reviving the XL pipeline is not going to be a long-term solution.
The U.S. needs to start emulating France, which obtains 70% of its energy from nuclear power, and start building more nuclear power plants or pods unlike the huge Three Mile Island in Middletown, Pennsylvania, which was constructed in the late 1970s. The U S. greatly needs to construct vast nuclear pods such as what Dominion Energy is currently building in eastern Virginia to power Amazon data farms until the U.S. can transition to more abundant and diversified reliable green and nongreen energy, which does not produce vast quantities of carbon dioxide.
If the U.S. does not act with wise foresight in the next five or ten years, the devastating effects of these category 4 or 5 hurricanes originating in the Gulf of Mexico are going to become much worse and devastating to both residential homes and businesses. The canary in the coal mine will ultimately be the insurance companies, who will refuse to sell any homeowners’ and commercial policies along both the Gulf of Mexico and Florida shoreline followed by significantly increased rates inland.
In the meantime, I think that it might be best to not rename the Gulf of Mexico, and not risk foolishly damaging our international reputation by calling it the Gulf of America as nationalistically advocated by both President Donald Trump and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.
That is primarily because the Gulf of Mexico in the near future might become synonymous with being a disaster zone. Plus, Spain preceded the colonization of North America more than one hundred years before the English and French ever colonized the New World. So any potential name change to the Gulf of Mexico would also be a supreme insult to Mexico City including the countries of Central America and the western Caribbean, thereby resurrecting the negative memory of Yankee imperialism, which all these Hispanic countries have called this body of water the “Gulf of Mexico” for more than 400 years.
Hopefully, the Associated Press will soon win its lawsuit against the White House for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” which President Trump mandated in an executive order (Section 4) on January 20.